Gallery One is grateful to have been able to spend an evening with artist Dean Home to celebrate the opening of his wonderful new body of work ‘Summer Time Oasis’. With many of the works selling quickly we are so excited for our clients to be soon enjoying these paintings in their new homes.
“As an artist, I have always seen myself as being on a journey. The journey seems to be a necessary, insightful descriptor for someone who has had by now well over 60 solo shows. Things discovered and insights about oneself require an ever-evolving journey and that is very much on display in this current body of work.
I do start from a still life genre proposition and have over time explored many of the possibilities and fault lines of these interiors and assembled objects. The magic of asking simple objects to be more and mean more has lead me to recognising a suite of landscape sensations emerging in the work. The overlay of the two genres has, for me, made many of the articles and objects sparkle with a greater intensity than if they were just belonging to one world.
The mantra energising and organising this overlay comes from the oriental coda “Virtue lies in the mountains and wisdom in water”. In an attempt to show the flow of this “water” I have generated compositions showing many of the objects (bowls, stones, shells, even driftwood) being washed by this imaginary river of wisdom which has come from on high: the landscapes of trees floating on mountain tops in a swirl of mist seem to act as that place of ideals and contemplation being achieved.
The motif of the hidden river and some of the bowls capturing a little water brought to mind the idea of an oasis: cool, blue greens – living, to quote Goethe – and, extending that, pinks and yellows conjuring a kind of dry, outside world. Out of the surprise of those colours many more ideas of freeing the colours from the shapes came about and these are starting to appear with some urgency in this show.”
– Dean Home
